Innocent drove on. At Gitega, Burundi’s second city—I hardly noticed the place, and Deo didn’t have
much to say about it—we turned north onto an orange dirt road.
“My stomach’s really feeling bad,” Deo said.
I sensed he wasn’t talking to me, but I felt I had to respond. “Do you want to go back?” My voice, I’m
afraid, sounded hopeful.
“No. No, no, no, no.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” he said. He added, “I’m going to shut up.”
Now he was keeping his word. We rode along mostly in silence. The orange dirt road must have been
graded recently. It felt smooth, too smooth, as if we were traveling a little distance above the ground, the
SUV sliding around corners like a small plane in the wind. For me, everything began to seem like too
much of something—the road too orange, the dust too thick in my nose, the silence too prolonged. I had
the feeling that this trip was taking us too far into something and that if I looked back I might see the
road closing up behind us. I leaned forward and told Deo, “Maybe we should just go back.”
He turned a little toward me, and said, rather sternly, “You may not see the ocean, but right now we are
in the middle of the ocean, and we have to keep swimming.” It was his way of telling me to shut up. I
tried to obey. Now and then he made terse comments: “This is a nightmare area. Many militiamen came
from here.” “We are passing the road to Bugendena.” (I remembered his story of finding the slaughtered
family, around dawn, in a village near Bugendena.) “There is the valley of the Mubarazi again.” Huge
eucalyptus trees lined the sides of the road. We passed a bunch of brick houses, half fallen down,
greenery poking up through the remnants of their roofs. “I don’t know what I was thinking when I came
here,” Deo said, as if to himself. He meant back when he was a medical student and had asked to be sent
to Mutaho’s hospital. He pointed to our left, toward the valley that sloped down from the road, a brushy-
looking landscape, the place where his long flight had begun. “I went down here.” He added, in a
murmur, “Trying to be as quiet as I could.”
“To get away from the road?”
“Yes, exactly.”
A little farther on, Innocent turned onto a well-tended dirt road, passed through a flimsy gate, and
stopped. Up ahead lay the remnants of the hospital. It had not been demolished and replaced after all.
Much of what had been here thirteen years ago was gone, but a piece of the original remained, as it
happened the very piece in which Deo had lived. And the remnant, a bunch of one-story concrete
buildings, had evidently been repaired and repainted, from white to a mustardy yellow. Deo sat silently,
staring at the buildings through the windshield. Just then a man crossed our field of vision, paying no
attention to us. A farmer perhaps, and he was carrying a brand-new machete, its blade still encased in
clear plastic.
“Oh, my God,” murmured Deo in English, his voice barely audible. Then he spoke to Innocent in
Kirundi. “Look at that.”
Deo translated Innocent’s response for me: “Maybe this is one of the machetes left over.”
“Don’t say that, Innocent,” Deo answered.
Innocent, it seemed to me, had an abundance of sangfroid, but he knew the history of this place and he
had reason to be spooked by the sight of machetes. So he called the man over for a chat, just to ease his
own mind, just to make sure, I think, that this was merely a farmer and not a malevolent apparition.
About half a dozen people were sitting on a concrete ledge in front of the hospital. They were staring at
us. “So what are we going to do here?” I asked Deo.
He didn’t seem to hear me. He had been gazing out the windshield with the lassitude of the bedridden, a
little slumped in his seat, a little slack-jawed, and now it was as if he’d been shocked back to action. He
sat up. He looked different from any version of Deo I’d known, not so much confident as fierce, under
his jaunty black bush hat, in his aviator-style dark glasses. He leaned out the side window and called to
the people sitting in front of the hospital. “Amahoro! Mura kome?” “Peace! How are you?”
He opened his door. As he closed it behind him, he said, “At this moment, I don’t care. I want to go
inside.”
He wasn’t speaking to me. I tried to get his attention. “Well, I do care, Deo. So …” But he wasn’t
listening.
A young man came up to us, the person in charge of the facility. The people who worked for him called
him “the doctor.” (“He’s not,” Deo told me. “He’s a nurse. He has a tenth-grade education.”) Deo
addressed “the doctor” in a friendly, executive way, like a man giving orders who knows they’ll be
obeyed. He told “the doctor” we had come from the United States to look at hospitals, with an eye to
learning more about nutrition programs.
“The doctor” led us inside. I had been struck by the tidiness of the facility’s exterior, its swept grounds,
its good repair. The innards were something else altogether, a warren of narrow interior hallways, empty
and echoing, open at their ends to the outdoors. The walls were streaked with bird shit. From somewhere
outside came the bleating of a goat. There was a screeching of birds, amplified by the tall narrow
concrete walls, and a flock of what looked like sparrows flew over our heads. I looked up. Dozens of
wasps’ nests hung just overhead, suspended from the high concrete ceilings on immensely long, weblike
tethers. I remembered a phrase from the Gospel of Matthew: “Whited sepulchres.” (“Whited sepulchres,
which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones.”) I had seen a
photograph of a hallway of this hospital taken after the massacre, with a burned body in the foreground,
the whole picture dark purple in my memory. “What are we doing?” I said to Deo.
He didn’t answer. He was chatting with “the doctor” and trying the handles of metal doors, opening one
door after another, onto identical-looking rooms, all empty of patients. In several there was a rusty bed
frame but no mattress. In one, there was a cylindrical piece of equipment, some sort of medical device
that clearly hadn’t been used in years—I didn’t look at it closely. I felt as if I were holding my breath
against the moment when we would get out of there. Deo was trying another door handle, his false smile
for “the doctor” gone for the moment, an alert, angry look passing over his face. The door wouldn’t
open. He turned to me, looked me in the eyes, then looked at the doorknob. I didn’t understand right
away that he was showing me his former room, the place where he’d left his door open and death had
passed him by. It was just as well I didn’t get his meaning. As it was, I was having a hard time hanging
on to a pretense of equanimity.
Deo had tried to describe his nightmares to me. In the telling, they hadn’t seemed unusual. Everyone has
bad dreams. Even the most sheltered are chased by bogeymen from time to time. Up until now I hadn’t
fully understood the difference: that even his most lurid dreams weren’t weirder or more frightening
than what inspired them. He didn’t wake up from his nightmares thankful they weren’t real. Now, for the
first time, I thought I could imagine what it might have been like for him during some of those nights in
the comfy Black Hole in SoHo. At the moment, in that corridor of the fake hospital—all that money
spent on fixing up an empty shell in a country full of illness—everything felt eerie in the worst sense. It
was as if I were looking around inside a dream of Deo’s, a dream I was in, and looking around at the
cause of the dream simultaneously.
This was a place of unreason, and at the moment I had no faith at all in the power of reason against it.
Part of the problem, I think, was that for the moment I didn’t trust Deo. The smile he turned on “the
doctor” was radiant. I’d never seen him so angry.
Why were there no patients in the hospital? Deo asked.
“The doctor” replied that people had felt reluctant to come here since “the crisis.”
La Crise had become the common euphemism for the civil war, the euphemism favored by many
Burundians when speaking to strangers, because if you used a more descriptive term you might reveal
your ethnicity and which side you’d been on. Oh? Deo said, the light from his smile flaring. What
“crisis” was that?
“The doctor” frowned. He must have sensed we weren’t the people Deo had said we were. In any case,
he had stopped smiling. Deo didn’t seem to care. “Do you want to take a picture?” he asked me.
“No,” I said. “I left my camera in the car.” I muttered, “Let’s get out of here.” At any moment, I
imagined, “the doctor” would go off and bring back who knew what.
Deo didn’t seem to hear me. He was telling me what “the doctor” had told him, that the place had been
renovated back in 2000.
“I see that it’s functioning really well,” I replied.
“And the whole thing is empty,” Deo went on. We were standing on a concrete porch now, facing an
interior courtyard, open to the sun. There was a tree in the middle, and grass. Deo said, “This is where I
was. This courtyard was full of bodies. I came out here, and I went this way.”
“I think we should go, Deo.”
“Yah,” he said. But he went on talking, in a low and ruminating voice: “It was much bigger than this.
But the site … They replaced the windows. Around here, right here, this ground was covered with
bodies. I was right here. Around here on these grasses, packed with bodies. They were really just coming
down these hallways and knocking down the doors and killing the people inside.”
“Let’s go back to Bujumbura,” I said.
“Mura koze.” Deo was thanking “the doctor.” Innocent had pulled the car up closer to the building. He
had also opened the doors. Clearly, he too was eager to leave. I climbed in. Deo climbed in. Then Deo
got out again, with his camera. He strode away and started taking pictures. “The doctor,” I saw, had
rejoined his crew on the concrete ledge. They stared at Deo.
It seemed as though he took pictures for a very long time, though it was probably only a few minutes
before he got back in the car, no longer smiling, but with his jaw still hard.
Innocent had kept the engine running. He said, as he drove out through the chicken-wire gate, “Deo, I
don’t feel comfortable here.”
“Innocent,” said Deo, “where in Burundi do you feel comfortable?”
Innocent didn’t answer.
As we drove on, Deo looked out at the valley across which he’d begun his long escape, in the dark,
almost thirteen years before.
“There were all these drums, and houses around here were burning.”
“It was the middle of the night, right?”
“Yah. All day I stayed along the river Mubarazi.”
On the way back, Deo wanted to drive through Bugendena, the first town he’d skirted on his escape.
Innocent took the turn off the main road, but then I made a fuss. Hadn’t Deo heard that Bugendena was
patrolled by former militiamen? Hadn’t we seen enough for today? I’m afraid I grew vehement.
Deo told Innocent that I was afraid to go on. Innocent told him, “I’m afraid, too.” He told Deo, in so
many words, “You know, I don’t care about myself. Right now I can easily go to Bugendena without
you, but I’m just thinking how you survived and now you’re going back looking for trouble. Do you
know how many people struggled to survive and didn’t survive? And now you are coming back here on
purpose? It’s like you are laughing. This is a stupid idea.”
Deo later explained to me, “Innocent was thinking deep about it. And he was warning me. He was just
like referring to all these old beliefs, you know?” That is, Innocent accused him of tempting fate or the
devil, putting us all at risk by incurring the wrath of the spirit world. I thought I understood. Deo was
behaving like one of those arrogant ancient Greek heroes who, victorious in a battle, succumbs to hubris,
claims he’s mastered fate, doesn’t fear Atê’s retaliation, and for his stupid boast gets visited by Nemesis.
I was inclined to agree with Innocent.
As we drove back on the orange dirt road in silence, I thought that I should start talking about bricks
again. Just to change the subject. For the time being, though, I couldn’t manage even that. When we hit
the paved road, I began to feel relieved, but then Deo insisted that we stop again at the memorial in
Kibimba. This time the small shrine made me think of a diminutive Greek temple, on its way to
becoming a ruin. Deo took some photographs, as vehicles and bicycles passed by—as, I imagined, the
drivers and riders glared at him. When he got back in the SUV, he stared at the message written on the
front of the memorial, “PLUS JAMAIS .A!” He sniffed, and said as others had before him and others no
doubt would again, “I have learned never to say, ‘Never again.’”
Chapter SIXTEEN
Burundi,
2006
Every day in Burundi, Innocent drove us to places that seemed inhabited with Deo’s memories, waiting
for him to return. The country’s lone medical school was an obligatory stop. The Coca-Cola stand was
still there, marking the spot where he’d climbed off the army truck when he’d finally made it back from
Rwanda. And here across the street was the medical school’s main building, where he had studied so
assiduously. The building was massive and still looked rather new. “It was so beautiful!” Deo cried,
gazing up at it, his eyes fixed on a great vertical crack that some sort of artillery had made in a concrete
wall.
In his day, he remembered, more than a hundred faculty had taught here. The school was functioning
again but, he said, with only seven full professors. He wanted to go inside. A pair of custodians obliged
him. The current students were on vacation. The place was empty. It felt like a ruin. A lock and chain
barred the way to one wing, which was in danger of collapse. Tattered curtains hung in the classrooms
where Deo had received lectures on basic physiology, pathology, pharmacology. In the laboratory where
he’d first seen bacteria swimming in a petri dish, there were no microscopes anymore—all stolen, the
custodians said. There were no textbooks or slides for students to study, no slide projector for that
matter, and only a small collection of tattered medical journals, which a sign on the library door asked
students not to photocopy lest they be damaged.
